Festo
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2011–2021
1:48 · 3.1M views · Mar 22, 2011
Festo's promo video of SmartBird, an ultralight bionic flying model inspired by the herring gull that flaps and twists its wings to fly. It shows the robot in flight.
Recommended as a spectacular example of bio-inspired robotics, and a pointer to Festo's other work.
6 comments from Hacker News
This is "autonomous" at the windup toy level. Festo, the German robotics company, is way ahead in autonomous soft robots. See their "Air Ray" fly around[1] Each year, Festo makes motion controllers and robots, especially high-precision pneumatic devices. Each year, they build something awesome. They do have some rigid components, but if they wanted to build one with fluidic logic, they certainly could. Their Smart Bird is spectacular.[2] Festo is a big, family-owned engineering company. 18,700 employees. founded in 1925. Annual sales €2.64 billion. One of the most innovative companies in mechanical engineering, yet a totally different business model than Silicon Valley's. [1] [LINK] [2] this video
The German industrial control and automation company Festo [0] created a bionic swift [1] as an engineering demo this year. The flapping wings are no longer as rigid as in their earlier flapping bird model [2]. Go and check out their other stuff (e.g. a dragonfly: [3], a flying fox or aquatic animals), it's great! Here is a Youtube search for Festo Animals for your convenience [4]. [0] [LINK] [1] BionicSwift: [LINK] [2] SmartBird: this video [3] Dragonfly: [LINK] [4] [LINK]
You should definitely watch this: [LINK] and this video Also, while birds are really good at using their wings to glide and provide propulsion flapping designs that need to lift much more than their own weight have so far not worked very well. So I don't really see them as viable for packages.
If you're interested in this, I highly recommend looking at the stuff that Festo (a german industrial automation company) is doing: [LINK] (This is from 2008). And not necessarily related, but really cool anyway: this video
Uh...look at this thing: this video This is made by Festo, a German industrial automation company. They did this for a trade show. It was "for fun". Imagine what we're capable of building for spying on China. I doubt we're having problems with it.